Hazel Rose Markus

Biography

Markus was born Hazel June Linda Rose in London, England, in 1949 to a British-Catholic mother and a Jewish-American father. When Markus was four years old, the Rose family immigrated to San Diego, California, where she grew up to be an accomplished longboard surfer.

Markus received her bachelor's degree in psychology from San Diego State University, where she initially wanted to pursue a career in journalism. After a demonstration in Psychology 101, however, she changed her major to psychology. She earned her doctorate in social psychology from the University of Michigan, where she later became one of the university’s faculty members. During her time at the University of Michigan, she was also a research scientist at the Institute for Social Research.

With her husband, the late social psychologist Robert Zajonc, Markus moved to the Stanford department of psychology in 1994. As a psychology professor and co-founder of the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Markus continues her research on how cultures and selves make each other up.

Research contributions

Markus' most significant contributions to social psychology are her conceptualizations of the self-schema (Markus, 1977), of the mutual constitution of self and culture, and of the distinction between the independent and interdependent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991). The self-schema is a cognitive representation that organizes knowledge about the self and guides processing of self-relevant information. In Study 1 of Markus (1977), participants completed a reaction time task, where they were presented with personality traits and asked to hit a button labeled "Me" if the trait was self-descriptive and another button labeled "Not Me" if the trait was not self-descriptive. When participants classified a trait that they had previously said described themselves, they were faster to categorize the trait with the "Me" button than participants who had previously said the trait was only moderately descriptive. The faster response time of people who felt the trait was self-descriptive reflects an association of that trait with their self-schema. Self-schemas and the self-concept remain among the most researched concepts in social psychology.

Markus is also a pioneering figure in cultural psychology, a field which explores how cultural contexts both shape and reflect individuals' emotions, cognitions, motivations, and other psychological processes (Kim & Markus, 1999) in a process that Markus and her coauthors call mutual constitution or the culture cycle. Her recent research includes biracial identity, where she found that for ethnicity reports on forms such as the SAT or the census, if a biracial person is not allowed to choose to identify with more than one race, their self-esteem lowers. This was apparent in a survey that they were to take following the ethnicity report during the research. Also, biracial individuals from higher socioeconomic levels are more likely to admit to their biracial status. Asian/White are most likely to mark their ethnicity as biracial, followed by Black/White, and then Latino/White. Markus has also completed research on differences between East-Asian and European-American cultural norms, as well as biological differences that occur from different cultural perspectives and practices. Markus found that older Japanese adults reported an increase in personal growth as they aged, whereas older Americans reported a decrease. Interpersonal well-being is also rated higher in older Japanese adults. However, both Japanese and American adults reported a lack of purpose in life as they age.

Recent books

Journal articles